The most ironic testimony to the lethal power of whiteness is that of George Robinson,
a black migrant driller who became the workers' "leader and voice," who
"holds all their strength together: / To fight the companies to make somehow a
future" (OS 16). His insider's description of Gauley Bridge contrasts
ironically with the reporter's first impressions: "Gauley Bridge is a good town for
Negroes, they let us stand around, they let us stand / around on the sidewalks if we're
black or brown" (OS 21). His definition of a "good town for Negroes"
indicates the degree of official harassment a black man might expect in such a segregated
town, but his tone is more ironic than we first suppose, as his account of Union Carbide
labor practices goes on to substantiate. Significantly, Robinson's testimony is written in
the form of a blues poem. Of the many examples of "our buried poetry" (LP
98) that Rukeyser discusses in The Life of Poetry, she pays the greatest tribute to
the blues. As she writes of Bessie Smith, the pain expressed by so many blues singers
corresponds with the treatment they receive by a social system quick to capitalize on
their talenton their laborbut slow to provide necessary support in time of
need: "their powers realized, these singers in a moment are surrounded by the
doorless walls of an ambivalent society" (LP 112). Robinson's blues testimony
exposes how systematic such "ambivalence" is. He conveys every absurdly
dehumanizing detail in an understated manner that indicts as it seems to so passively
accept the pervasiveness of the "white dust." The end rhyming and repetition of
key words and phrases reinforces this awful absurdity: "When the blast went off the
boss would call out, Come let's go back, / when that heavy loaded blast went white, Come,
let's go back . . . the camps and their groves were colored with the dust, / we cleaned
our clothes in the groves, but we always had the dust" (OS 22). Robinson's
blues concludes with an image of whiteness that is brutal in its parody of racial coding:

As dark as I am, when I came out at morning after the tunnel at night,
with a white man, nobody could have told which man was white.
The dust had covered us both, and the dust was white. (OS 22)

The cost of such racial equality is of course the lives of both the black miner and the
white miner. If, on the surface, both appear white in their shared experience as laborers,
the lack of value ascribed to their lives by their employer suggests a commonality more
often associated with black lives in the United States. The white appearance of the
workers, the virtual erasure of blackness in the deadly silica dust, certainly speaks to
the racial coding of the history of Gauley Bridge. Yet the commonality compelled by shared
adversity also suggests a potential for interracial alliances to contest the white
supremacist thinking that Robinson so bitterly mocks.